When She's Asleep, She Looks Like An Angel
Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan, I went to psychoanalyst four times a week.
| Series | |
|---|---|
| Work In Progress | |
| Original Broadcast Date | |
| 1985 | |
| Cast | |
| Joe Frank | |
| Format | |
|
Serious Monologue 52 minutes | |
| Preceded by: | A Pact With God |
| Followed by: | A Kiss Is Just A Kiss |
| Purchase | |
When She's Asleep, She Looks Like An Angel is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series Work In Progress in .
Synopsis
Joe sees a psychiatrist who specializes in children, her only adult patient. Her husband teaches Jewish history. He dies; Joe attends his funeral. 23rd psalm in background. Joe becomes obsessed with his corpse, won't talk about it in therapy, takes a diplomatic post in Africa.[1]
9: A little girl (his daughter?) dotes on Joe - 'Sometimes when I'm stretched out on the sofa she'll climb up on top of me and fall asleep on my chest... When she's asleep she looks like an angel...'
11: On California Highway 1[2], on a cliff above the water, an unemployed carpenter and his girlfriend, Carla, a forensic serologist in the medical examiner's office, find an abandoned handbag. They drive to the nearest place with a phone, a restaurant, call the cops, wait for them to arrive.
28: 23rd psalm in background.
29: The little girl again - 'She likes me to make up stories, sitting before the piano...'
30: 'Yesterday a woman called...' who wants a lawyer. Joe can't help. She wants him to call back. She wants him to tell her a number that was special to her. Joe thinks about that. We hear him talking to himself, saying numbers.
33: When he was a boy, falling asleep, Joe tortured himself with fantasies of making awful decisions.[3]
35: While Joe was living in a fancy building as a boy, Pat, one of the staff, was caught having snuck into their apartment, was fired.
37: Interview on public television with Holocaust survivor.[4]
38: Joe's friend George who has trouble crying.
42: Marshall gets drunk at Caroline's Christmas party, laments the deaths of trees.
43: Joe picks up a hitchhiker in Montana who tells him of 40-foot tall Jesus.
44: Joe wanders a corridor at a college, overhears a graduate assistant lecturing about limits of human intelligence.
45: Joe drives one night on route 5, stops at a gas station, hears people clapping and singing, then a preacher. The station attendant is the same person lecturing in the segment above. Joe attacks him.
47: 23rd psalm in background.
48: The little girl again - 'Every Thursday evening I take her on my rounds. We drive to the homes of families I've photographed...' Joe brings lovers home, takes their pictures.
51: Joe says more numbers.
Music
- "Harima" - Mandingo (from Watto Sitta, 1984) | YouTube [7:38]
Additional credits
The original broadcast credits state: "Technical production by Tom Strother. Music by Sonic Images."
Miscellanea
After attending his psychiatrist's husband's funeral, Joe says he went to see a movie, 'The film was about an unhappily married man, trapped in a boring and unsatisfying career, who contracted to stage his own death so that he could begin a new life as someone else. But his Faustian bargain, played out in another part of the country, turned into a nightmare.'
A scholar at jfwiki.org suggests it's 'Seconds'
Footnotes
- ↑ Joe tells a somewhat-different version of this story in No Angel.
- ↑ Joe says US 1, but must mean California 1; he makes the same mistake in Dear Annie
- ↑ Joe re-uses this segment in Journal and Higher Learning.
- ↑ Joe uses a modified version of this story in Philosophy
